ENERGY IN ADVERSITY

The Lands and The Living

Welcome to the vestige, the ending world. I’m no longer certain how many generations have passed since this planet began to wither. How many more until it becomes a quiet stone, drifting around the sun? There is no certain end, nor a definite beginning, but the people all know they exist. This world came from somewhere, after all, and it has been changing ever since.

Our worries of the end began with the wells. The wells are pockets of some sort of “energy,” cutting through the planet’s skin. This energy, it seems, is a kind of blood seeping out from the planet’s core. Where there is blood, there is a wound, and over the span of generations, wells began to emerge across the globe. Now, with a planet bleeding out of every mountain, forest, and ocean bed, the people are uncertain how long their world will remain. It is only a vestige of its old self.

Where there is a wound, though, there soon may be scars — sections of flesh irrevocably changed. This strange energy is, after all, radiation. It morphs the land and the living that remain above it. Above the wells, animals of all sorts bear children that are genetically shifted and  often become warped themselves. People begin to feel the ebb and flow of the energy and learn to move it to their whims to supernatural effect. Even roots swell and glow as they are filled with energy, becoming vespers in the process. Though the wells promise the end of the vestige, they are a catalyst for something new — something more — to follow.

Now energy is ubiquitous. Wells continue to shift the living and the land, but the world has adapted. Schools of combat manipulate energy to devastating effect. Engineers employ vespers in inventions to make new technologies possible. Some people have even evolved deliberately through the use of the wells themselves. The world is changing, and it will change more still, until the day that it goes quiet.

What will you do here with the days that remain?